Comportamiento del turismo nostálgico en Uruguay y Chile

Tourism is one of the most important activities for the Uruguayan economy and for many Latin American countries. It implies more employment, improved economic activity and higher foreign exchange earnings. This work focuses on visiting friends and relatives’ tourism (VFR) or nostalgic tourism, which refers to people who emigrated from their own country and return to visit as tourists because they have family, friends, and nostalgia for their country of origin. These tourists have a dynamic and behavior of visit and expense different from traditional tourism. In this paper we compare the behavior of VFR tourists from Chile and Uruguay considering the variations in income, prices and exchange rates. We also studied the behavior of Argentinean tourists in order to compare them with the VFR, since Argentina is the country where most Chilean and Uruguayan migrants live. We used Johansen's methodology through the error correction model (VEC) trying to find co-integration relationships. Among the main results we find several co-integration relationships between income, tourism demand and the real exchange rate of Chile and Argentina and Argentina and Uruguay. By increasing Chile's economic activity by one percentage point, the arrival of Chilean VFR tourists increases by 1.7%. In the case of Argentine tourists to Chile, as economic activity grew 1%, increased 2.6%. In the case of Uruguay, the results indicate that with a 1% increase in economic activity, the arrival of Uruguayan VFR tourists increases by 2.5%, while with an improvement in economic activity in Argentina by 1%, visitors from that country to Uruguay increase by 5%. These results ratify tourism as a luxury good, although income elasticity is lower for VFR tourism than for foreign visitors.